The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) rose to 135.57 in October from an upwardly revised 132.86 in September, first reported as 132.74, and is up 5.4% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
"The bounce back in the Employment Trends Index in October was one of the largest monthly increases ever, and comes after two declines because of the hurricanes," said Gad Levanon, chief economist, North America, at The Conference Board. "As expected, the ETI picked up and continued its strong upward trend, suggesting that employment growth will remain solid in the coming months."
The increasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were: initial claims for unemployment insurance, percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, industrial production, real manufacturing and trade sales, number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, consumer confidence “jobs hard to get” percentage, and job openings, according to the Conference Board.
The ETI aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out so-called "noise" to show underlying trends more clearly.
